Are we all ancient Christians?

How Early Christianity Anticipated the West

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads…

When the English actually believe that they know "intuitively" what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

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I’m currently on tour across the UK, hosting conversations with Alex O’Connor on theology, philosophy and religion. A question I’ve put to Alex so far is what he makes of the argument that Christianity was vital in shaping the moral imagination of the West. This argument was advanced most famously by Nietzsche, quoted above, and has returned to public consciousness with Tom Holland’s history, Dominion.

In its most ambitious form, the argument runs that many of the things we love about Western civilisation – its emphasis on personal liberty, limited government, care for the poor and marginalised, and the inherent dignity of humanity – can all be traced, directly or indirectly, to Christianity. The concerning payoff is that as the West moves beyond Christianity – if indeed it does – the very fabric of civilisation will be torn.

Alex is not convinced by this argument, calling it “almost complete nonsense.” In our Liverpool show, he pointed out that human freedom may have been supported by (evangelical) abolitionists, but other Christians were perfectly fine with owning slaves. And for Alex, these Christians were not reading against but rather with the grain of their scriptures. The Old Testament gives advice on how to own slaves, and the New Testament similarly assumes – and never wholly contests – the widespread practice.

I am similarly sceptical of those who would argue that Western rights can be read directly out of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures. Yet this has never been the ‘Tom Holland’ argument – at least not as articulated by Holland himself – and I think there is a variation of it which is more defensible. This is the view that early Christianity made some surprising moves which anticipate ideas that the West now finds intuitive.

The basis for this argument is set out by Larry Hurtado in Destroyer of the Gods. As the subtitle of the book suggests, Hurtado has plotted several modes of ‘Early Christian distinctiveness in the Roman world.’ These idiosyncrasies have become common-places in the way we see the world today, whether or not we are Christian. In this post, I sketch three ways in which early Christianity anticipated Western ideas.

A Voluntary, Trans-Ethnic Faith

In the opening line of his magnum opus, Theology and Social Theory, John Milbank reminds us that ‘once there was no secular.’ To be religious in the ancient world was simply to be. Making sacrifices to the gods was a daily part of life. To revere the gods was not something one chose; it was a state one inherited, like one’s family or race.

In this world full of gods, the Jewish people were something of an exception. As staunch monotheists, they made sacrifices to God on Caesar’s behalf, but were not required to sacrifice to the Roman deities. For this, they were routinely decried by Romans as socially deviant. Yet this practice was still accepted, because it bore a likeness to the Roman’s own system: it was perceived as ancient and ancestral.

In this religio-political framework, Christians occupied a very peculiar position. For a start, Christianity was populated largely by Gentiles (non-Jews) who were now refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods. They were not Jews. They had no ancestral or ethnic obligation to join the new cult. Yet they were also – now – not properly ‘pagan’ either. As Paula Fredriksen describes them, they were “ex-pagan pagans.” Or to translate this into the language of ancient Roman writers – they were atheists.

It is difficult to overstate how weird this made Christianity. Today, we see faith in much the same way as the Christians did: as a voluntary act that transcends ethnicity. Yet in the ancient world, to be Roman was to worship the Roman gods; to be Jewish to worship the Jewish God. The idea that there was ‘no Jew nor Gentile… in Christ Jesus’ was a radical notion which detached faith from race and cult. It is an idea that anticipates the common notion of religion we have today as a voluntary choice.

The Limits of the State

I have already noted that the early Jesus movement was comprised largely of “ex-pagan pagans,” who refused to make sacrifices to the Emperor or worship the gods. This did not mean that the early Christians completely ignored Caesar’s authority or were deliberately deviant. Paul claims that earthly authorities derived their power from God, and Jesus calls his followers to ‘give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’.

Yet Jesus’ teaching comes with an important second clause: ‘give unto… God what is God’s. For the early Christians, Caesar may have a proper claim over taxes and governance, but not on the deeper matters of conscience, morality and worship. In brief, the early Christians began to drive a wedge between the authority of the government and God’s own authority. They set limits to the authority of the state.

This is another idea that may seem obvious to us today in the West. Of course, the government is not divine! Of course religion and politics are distinct. Yet in antiquity, such an idea was absurd. The early Christians resisted it because they recognised a different authority over their lives. This planted the seeds for the kind of separation between state and religion which would be later codified in Western law.

To be clear, I am not claiming that Christianity necessitated the rise of secular democracies. Nor is it possible to ignore the fact that Christianity came to tether itself in various ways to Roman power. I am suggesting, however, that this later wedding of Church with state was originally an unnatural one. For the earliest Christians, these two phenomena were kept largely distinct.

Women, Slaves and Children

We have suggested so far that early Christianity made two radical moves for its gentile followers: (1) it creates the notion of a religiosity that transcended ethnicity or kin; and (2) it separates religion from politics. Yet when people suggest that Christianity laid the ‘foundation’ of the West, they are usually thinking in more moral terms. They are suggesting that there was something distinctly Christian about Western values.

It is here that the ‘Tom Holland’ argument seems to face its greatest hurdle. For today, we recognise that all people – men, women and children – have the right to freedom and liberty. Yet in the ancient world, Christians simply assumed the practice of slavery and a steeper division between women and men. Rather than denying the oppressive power structures at play, Christians in some ways reinforced them.

Consider a selection of passages in the New Testament which scholars refer to as ‘household codes’. These texts call for women to submit to their husband’s authority, and for slaves to submit to their masters. A particularly troubling instruction is found in 1 Peter, which states: ‘slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh’ (18-20).

It is clear from these codes that early Christians were unconcerned with the overhaul of societal norms. Yet on one level this is completely unsurprising. Many of Jesus’ early followers were anticipating his return, and were in no social position to imagine a society without slavery. To fault first-century Christians – a small sect of no more than ten thousand people, many of low status – for not holding a modern view of these issues, seems to mis-comprehend the position of the early Jesus movement.

With that said, I do think there are some ways in which early Christians stood out ethically from their Roman neighbours. Here I will briefly list just three:

a. The dignity of women and slaves. The first way in which Christians stood out was in granting a degree of moral dignity and spiritual equality to women and slaves. We see this in the household codes themselves, which – to my knowledge – are the only form of their kind which address both women and slaves. We find household codes in other ancient writers, yet these texts are always written by men to other men.

Imagine, then, that you are an early Christian slave hearing the household codes read aloud. You will hear that slaves are to submit to their masters, and women to their husbands. But in the same assembly, you will hear that husbands must love their wives, and that masters must not threaten their slaves, ‘since you know that he who is both their master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.’

There are two interesting things at play here. The first is that women and slaves are granted a degree of moral agency; the second is that the worst aspects of Christian husbands and masters is tempered. This is one practical way in which Paul’s statement that ‘there is no male or female… nor slave or free’ was manifest in early Christian meetings. It would also help to explain why it seems that Christianity seems to have been especially attractive to the lower classes, slaves and women.

b. The treatment of children. Another way in which Christianity stood out from the wider Roman world is in its treatment of children. Early Christian texts prohibit both abortion and the widespread practice of “exposure”, in which an unwanted infant was abandoned to die. For example, the Didache, an early Christian instruction manual, states: ‘You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.’

A still more striking way in which Christians stood out from their Roman neighbours was in their opposition to child abuse. In an ethic we find morally egregious today, Roman writers lauded pederasty, the sexual use of children and young adolescents. Yet Christian writers from the earliest period were completely opposed to this abuse.

So emphatic was Christian opposition to pederasty that Christians appear to have coined two new terms to condemn the practice: paidophthored (‘to corrupt/sexually abuse children) and its corresponding noun paidophthoros. The Didache and Epistle of Barnabas independently use these terms to condemn the practice alongside adultery and murder, which suggest their origin in even early Christian discourse.

c. The restraint of men. Finally, it is noteworthy that Christianity diverged from the wider Graeco-Roman world on other issues of sexual morality. Of special interest is the way in which early Christian texts restrain the sexual behaviours of men.

In the Roman world, it was widely tolerated for married men to have sex with prostitutes, courtesans and slaves, but not the reverse. Yet in early Christian discourse, all of these sexual activities are brought under the umbrella of what Paul calls porneia (‘sexual immorality’) – a term usually used by Roman writers to refer only to adultery. Resisting this double standard of male versus female sexual behaviour, Paul claims that men’s bodies belong only to their wives, and vice versa.

Another illustration of Christian resistance to sexual double-standards is the call for men to remain faithful to their wives, in a world in which divorce was common. In ancient Rome, the loyalty of women to their husbands was prized. There were even Latin and Greek words (univira and monandros) used to honour such women.

The striking move that Christianity makes is praising men who are faithful to their wives. Lacking a term to describe such men, the author of 1 Timothy has to compose a term to praise them: mias gynaikos andra (literally, ‘a one woman husband/man’). While this requirement was not placed on all Christians, it was held for both leaders and deacons of the Church as a model for righteous behaviour. We see here again that sexual standards typically reserved for women were applied by Christians to men.

Are we all ancient Christians?

I am under no illusion that ‘the West’ as we know it today is the product of a long process of technological development, political and philosophical reflection. It would be anachronistic – and palpably false – to impose a framework of human rights, secularism and feminism onto the early Christian texts, as if Western values can be read directly out of the Scriptures. I think Alex is rightly opposed to this argument.

Yet when we consider the ways in which early Christianity stood out from the wider Roman world, I think we all have much more in common with ancient Christians than we might imagine. Though there are other elements to tease out, I have here highlighted three ways in which Christianity anticipated ideas we now find intuitive:

1. The notion of faith as a voluntary act which transcends ethnic boundaries, anticipating the modern notion of ‘religion.’

2. The recognition that the state is not divine, anticipating the modern secular division between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’.

3. The spiritual dignity accorded to people – women, slaves and children – across the social spectrum, anticipating a modern concern for equality.

To point to these values is not to say that Christians lived them out, either in the past or today. On the contrary, the very fact that these ideas had to be argued for in early Christian debates is evidence that they were not intuitive or always easily liveable.

Yet to forget the distinctiveness of early Christiaity is to our own loss. There was something different about Christianity in the early Roman empire; something attractive and unobvious about it which was appealing. To get back in touch with that early Christian weirdness is to connect to an early part of our own history again.